The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Mob Versus Snob

Do you remember the end of history?

I do.

You know, when the collapse of Soviet communism signaled the
final triumph of American style democratic republican politics and free market
economics…the victory that underlies the somewhat more scientific brand of
American exceptionalism practiced by President Obama and excuses the often
extralegal and violent insertion of the United States in world affairs?

But looking back at how the last twenty years have played
out, I have a different theory of history: mob vs. snob.

By my reading, what keeps regimes in power is not the
slavishness of their allegiance to democracy and free market tropes.

It’s whether they can command the united support of their
elites, largely by ensuring that there are no plausible and ready alternatives
for increasing and securing wealth and privilege regardless of whatever
violence is done to the slogans of “free markets” and “democracy”.

That’s what happening in China, where the Chinese Communist
Party has successfully fostered a “hang together or hang separately” vibe for the
political and business elites; it’s what’s happened in Egypt as elites have
rallied and united once again behind the army over the cadaver of the MB…and in
Syria, where Bashar al Assad’s minority, undemocratic, and none too impressive
regime has shown an astounding ability to retain the allegiance of its elites
and exhibited a remarkable resilience.

Thanks to serial miscalculations and misunderestimations of
the survival skills of Bashar al Assad, the grim history of Western
cheerleading for the Syrian revolution is usually ignored.However, the defeat of the genuine Syrian
revolution was the inability of the rural rebels to enlist the support of the urban
elites or their offspring in 2011.The
first fatal moral and tactical failing of the revolution—and its cynical
Western and Gulf backers--was to substitute armed insurrection for popular
uprising in Damascus and Aleppo as punishment for the cities’ lack of
revolutionary fervor, as well as an expression of the hope that a push for
regime collapse would…well, usher in something better than the obscene carnival
of murder, extremism, misery, and banditry that resulted.

Perhaps Syrian elites are now cleaving even more closely and
desperately to the Assad regime than they were back in 2011.

Elite solidarity is not what happened in the Soviet Union,
thanks to Gorbachev’s abandonment of the Communist monopoly and the subsequent
rush for the national exits by appalled apparatchiks, not into the dustbin of
history, but into control of government organs and enterprises throughout the
ex-Soviet empire.

And elite solidarity is not the best one-word description of
what’s happening in the United States.

I will illustrate my thesis by a romp through early American
history.

During the “end of history” period, Alexander Hamilton was
often invoked as the architect of the triumph of the Western system.I am something of a pro-Hamiltonian
revisionist, since the original critique of Hamilton that prevailed until the
end of the 20th century (elite-adoring crypto aristo) was initially
put forth by a pair of Virginia slaveowners, Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, who adored democracy in the abstract but had definite difficulties
practicing it in the concrete.

Hamilton advocated a strong national government and
orchestrated its establishment in the United States through his energetic participation
in the composition, promotion, and, as first Treasury Secretary and George
Washington’s most trusted counselor, implementation of the central-government
friendly US constitution .He frequently
sparred with Jefferson and Madison, whose advocacy of (to editorialize here)
la-di-da pastoralism on a foundation of slavery looks a lot like an effort to
protect Virginian parochialism and particularism from the commercial and
industrial transformation of the United States—a transformation that Hamilton,
with his early and positive exposure to the British example, clearly saw
coming, and which he enabled with a powerful central government with strong fiscal,
legislative, and enforcement powers.

From the 21st century perspective the key element
was Hamilton’s extremely successful attempt to create a robust alliance between
the federal government and northern and northeastern business interests.Hamilton was desperately invested in a strong,
extensive federal union because the greater the sway of the federal government,
the more unique and attractive it looked as a bulwark of power, stability, and
property rights, and the better it could secure the loyalty of the elite.

Elite loyalty was, to put it mildly, an issue.Not just because of pervasive Loyalist (to
Britain) sentiment in the upper classes in the colonies that carried over into
the early days of the Republic.Also because
the United States was created on a foundation of elite disloyalty, amplified by
seditious incitement of populist forces.

It should be remembered that the American revolution was
driven to a significant extent by the alienation of US elites, especially in
New England, from Great Britain, and the creation of a potent alliance of “mob”
and “snob” fatal to British rule.The
Sons of Liberty were despised as rabble by most of the founding fathers, but elite
folk like John Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, et. al.
made the historic decision to stand with them, or maybe just exploit them as
anti-British shock troops and provocateurs, instead of denouncing them.

The revolutionary elite retained its affection for independence and
local impunity after the British were gone, and simply transferred it to
the hapless and impotent post-1776 US confederation.

However, after independence—and by the time the constitution was
written--US elites lost their love for the masses; Hamilton and his
Federalists, in particular, lived in terror of the mob, thanks to the outbreak
of Shays’s rebellion, the example of the French revolution and to the endless
willingness of poor and disenfranchised folk, especially in the rural western
reaches, to create a rumpus.

The normally phlegmatic George Washington was vocally
dismayed by the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, and joined Hamilton
in organizing an overwhelming federal force to march into the countryside and overawe
the miscreants.A similar exercise in
federal shock and awe occurred when Hamilton marched a federal force against
another Pennsylvania upset, Fries’ Rebellion, in 1799.

In the midst of the “Quasi War” with France in the late 1790s,
Hamilton had lobbied President John Adams frantically (and, for the sake of his
relationship with Adams, fatally) for a federal army that Hamilton would lead
under the aegis of the largely retired George Washington.This was held against Hamilton, both by Adams
and Jefferson, as an open admission of Hamilton’s caesarism, since it was
assumed that this army, while defending against the unlikely prospect of an
invasion of the United States by Napoleon, could be used to cow the federal
government or serve as the vehicle for some extra-curricular nationbuilding by
Hamilton, such as the seizure and annexation of western lands—and maybe even
South America--from their Spanish masters.

It seems more likely that Hamilton was carried away by the
fear of a French-style rural jacquerie and Jacobin-style urban purge, perhaps
sparked by some French military adventure and supported by a Jeffersonian fifth
column, and wanted a federal army as a shield—and sword--against both.And, admittedly, he wouldn’t have minded
leading the army through the Americas after putting paid to the French menace,
thereby winning more glory for himself and more territorial swag for the USA.

But Hamilton’s efforts to create a strong federal edifice
involved more than giving the central government independent military might to
cow local “mobocracy” when the compromised state militias weren’t up to the
task.Strengthening the bond between the
federal government and US elites—and weaning them from political collusion with
the ever-present and easily aggrieved “mob”—was a key feature of Hamilton’s
policy.

He famously bound elites to the federal government by
promising to fund all federal debts (currently trading at ten or fifteen cents
to the dollar) at par, to assume all state debts dating back to the revolution,
and coming up with a plausible way of paying them.He also rebuffed criticisms by Jefferson and
Madison that this policy was a sell-out of the revolutionary war veterans who
had been paid with these bonds but sold them at a deep discount to speculators,
and an unfair windfall for Hamilton’s well-heeled and well-informed buddies.

There’s a little more to this than “the rich got richer and
the poor got fucked” (though, of course, that’s exactly what happened).

Hamilton was intentionally giving the business elites some (inordinate)
skin in the federal game, so that they would cleave to the federal government
and not side with the mob—or their states--as they had in revolutionary times
against Britain, or during any of the serial crises that would occur as the
United States embarked on its bloody and highly successful campaign exploit the
resources of the land, the labor and creativity of its people, the capital and
energies of the elites, and the enormous potential of national and global
markets.

Specifically, Hamilton devoted a great deal of intellect and
energy to creating a bond between rich guy and the central government that
would address the biggest threat to the federal system: secession.

You know, like the kind of secession the 13 colonies carried
out only a decade before against the British government, and was threatened
every time some cluster of US states weren’t getting their way.The kind of secession that actually happened
in 1861.And the kind of secession that
Tea Party enclaves like northern Colorado now invoke as a solution for their
Obama-related grievances.And the kind
of secession (by the various Soviet SSRs and satellites) that brought the
Soviet Union to its knees.And the
uprising in eastern Libya (capital: Benghazi) that brought down Qaddafi with a
little outside help.

In each instance of secession, the secret sauce of freedom
wasn’t democracy and free markets; it was the fact that local elites abandoned
their allegiance to the center and sided with the locals instead.

Before the constitution was even ratified, secession was
already on the American agenda.

The most famous of the Federalist papers, No. 10, written by
Madison, rebutted the idea that democracy only works in small, homogenous
states and couldn’t work in an extensive empire that the United States was
clearly going to become.Specifically,
he argued that the republican form of government would interpose a civic-minded
and unfactional elite between gormless voters and the operating levers of the
government machinery.

Guess what.Madison
was wrong.

Madison was also guilty of ironic foreshadowing, since he
and Jefferson connived to create the first rebellious, elite-splitting faction
in the US government, during the administration of John Adams.

The United States was bedeviled from its inception by the centripetal
tendencies of its states and regions.Stability and a significant measure of unity was only achieved after
eighty years of escalating confrontation, through the rather undemocratic means
of a massive civil war and a ten year occupation of the south.

And guess what.You
can blame Madison for that, too.

To me, the alpha and omega for Jefferson and Madison was
southern privilege.They recognized
early on that southern privilege was based on a rickety, limited foundation of slavery-based
agriculture, which was increasingly at risk in a strong federal system as the
nation grew and industrialized and decisively moved away from the southern
model.If the constitution didn’t
adequately support pretensions to southern political, economic, and social
agency for the white crowd, it could go out the window.

Jefferson and Madison pioneered the state nullification
doctrine in their Kentucky and Virginia resolutions and initiated seventy years
of efforts to maintain southern autonomy which culminated in the Civil War.After Hamilton shattered his Federalist
faction with some unwise political maneuvers, Jefferson and Madison ruled the federal
roost and the contradictions between the slave-owning priorities of the south
and the rest of the union were papered over.Pro-Jeffersonian history usually excuses Jefferson and Madison’s transgressions
on the grounds that their nullification and state’s rights doctrines embodied
in the Resolutions were a desperate and limited riposte to the flagrantly
partisan and unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts.

Not so fast.Secession, which I define as elite disloyalty combined with populist
politics, a.k.a. the “mob and snob” revolutionary alliance, is as American as
apple pie and suited the tastes of Jefferson and Madison.

It wasn’t just the south that toyed with secessionist
impulses.Northern secession was
advocated by northern business classes frustrated by southern resistance to
Federalist fiscal and economic policies and the fear that the “Virginia faction”
had permanently captured the Federal government thanks to the inordinate weight of the south at the center thanks to the 3/5 rule (slaves counted at 3/5 for
representation purposes) and the ceaseless, united obstructionism of southern
delegations anxious to safeguard their dominance (and the future of the slave
system) as the nation expanded.

One of the many reasons for Hamilton’s disdain for Aaron
Burr that provoked the fatal duel was that Burr was looking to resurrect his
political fortunes by conniving to bring his home state of New York into a
nascent northern secessionist camp championed by elites in the New England
states.

When the Federalist party imploded thanks to Hamilton’s
spectacular political misjudgment and Jefferson and his acolytes controlled the
Federal government for decades, northeastern interests organized the Hartford
Convention during the War of 1812 to advance their pro-British/anti-embargo/pro-manufacturing
interests and priorities.Their
activities carried the faint but undeniable whiff of secession.The governor of Massachusetts even dispatched
an emissary to discuss a separate peace with Great Britain.This treasonous exercise never caught on, as
the war ended rather abruptly and favorably for the United States, much to the
discomfiture of the northerners and, in any case, the subsequent peace provided
the economic benefits that had previously been denied them.

After three decades of southern domination, federal power
inexorably shifted to the north and west, and the US government, while sedulous
in preserving the financial, legal, and coercive foundations of northern
prosperity, proved itself fatally ambivalent about protecting a key southern
elite interest and the foundation of the southern agricultural economy—slaves as
property.When southern elites felt
threatened by the prospect of loss of political primacy at the federal level
and the threat of a growing abolitionist consensus in Congress, they were
wedged off from the union (much as the business interests in the colonies were
wedged off from Britain in the 1770s) and turned their efforts to creating a “mob
and snob” integrated power base within their own states.

The result was decades of dismal extortion as the south used
the threat of resistance/nullification/secession to extract assurances of
continued passivity from the federal government on the slavery issue.

When the civil war came, many of the southern elite quickly abandoned
their allegiance to the federal government and jointed the CSA.

I also might point out that the mayor of New York City, with
its textile and export economy tied to southern cotton, actually proposed New
York secession in 1861.The dreaded “mob
and snob” alliance between some disgruntled New York plutocrats, Tammany politicians,
Copperheads (anti-war Democrats willing to accept southern slavery) and the
municipal lumpen re-emerged, culminating in the gruesome draft riots of 1863.

When the end came, it didn’t come thanks to the invincible
ideas of democracy and free markets (with the obvious and execrable exception
of slavery, southern economic and political practices did not differ
significantly from those of the north); it came because the elites of the north
united with the federal government to crush the south with their armies and
industrial power.

With the civil war, the southern elites and their
determinedly non-industrial, non-financial slave-shackled economy lost the
argument to the determinedly industrial and financially sophisticated north. Conquest,
the end of slavery, and the increasing industrialization of the United States
made secession, southern or otherwise, an unfeasible option.

Despite the awkward fact of southern elite treason, the
importance of elite support for the federal government was reaffirmed as, after
a brief interlude of carpetbagging, blacks were disenfranchised, and southern
elites were welcomed back into local and federal governments and the heart of
the southern economy.

This is not the triumph of democratic republicanism and free
markets; it was the successful reaffirmation of elite solidarity with the
federal government.

With the disappearance of the secessionist option, the
impetus toward a “mob and snob” alliance evaporated, and elites and the federal
government eagerly joined hands to protect property, privilege, and the
well-being of elites, by gun and bayonet if needed.

The robust national alliance of elites and the federal
government has survived the multiple crashes and cockups of capitalism—and racist
states’ rights rabblerousing--and has endured to this day.It’s not just in the republic of the United
States; elites of fascist Germany and imperial Japan have similar if more distasteful
epics of survival after national calamities.Russian elites did a pretty good job of coming out on top after the USSR
collapsed.I have a feeling that, if the
jerks in suits who run China are kicked out in some democratic upheaval, in ten
years China will be run by…jerks in suits.

So what we were seeing at the end of the 20th
century was not the “end of history”; it was the temporary, local, and
situational cessation of elite mischief against central governments.

Things changed, in Russia and the Middle East.Maybe things are about to change, here, in
the United States, as well.

The US federal government in all its present day
incarnations, be they Democratic or Republican, are desperately committed to
keeping the rich folk happy and their property safe.That counts for a lot, even with some pretty
major mismanagement of the world portfolio over the last 15 years.

The US still has effective means to secure the support of
increasingly globalized elites.First,
of course, as in Hamilton’s day, is the role of US government debt as the
linchpin of the world economy.The PRC
government still puts most of its pin money in US treasury bonds; the world’s
businessmen may be smarter in their investments, but they all want their acumen
backstopped by the ready availability of a financial instrument of immense
liquidity with a fixed rate of return backed by the taxing authority of the US
government on the American economy.

So the elite consensus in favor of keeping the US government
in business, at least as a bucket shop that underwrites global liquidity by the
creation and marketing of hundreds of billions of dollars of securities,
remains strong.

Having an immense military establishment in an atmosphere of
perpetual threat doesn’t hurt, either.Nor does, for that matter, absolute dominance of the global Internet/surveillance
space.These all attract the attention
and engagement and, to a significant extent, the loyalty of Western elites.

Trouble is, nation-state advantages are less significant in
a multi-polar, coexistence-based international regime.What’s left if we wind down the Global War on
Terror, as President Obama suggests?There
is a dearth of plausible threats and diminishing decent opportunities for the United
States to invoke in return for the active support of an increasingly globalized
elite.

In the end, it’s not Iraq, derivatives, China or the BRICS
that’s kicking America’s ass; it’s the planet.

This state of affairs is illustrated by “the two Gs”:
globalization and global warming.

Obviously, corporations have become multi-national, capital
has been largely freed from national constraints, and the loyalty of
capitalists—and their enthusiasm for supporting the US government—has become
less enthusiastic and more conditional.

Mitt Romney is a clueless ass, but he voiced the sincere feelings of
his fellow plutocrats as he expressed their resentment that the US government
was trying to harvest the global riches of these almost accidental citizens in
order to pursue domestic political and policy goals that seemed to them increasingly
remote and incomprehensible.

As a result, the United States is harvesting increasing
elite disdain and its sullen handmaiden, perpetual political gridlock.

The Koch brothers may very well fear and detest the
rabble.But the US federal government is
only one of several resources available to them around the world to protect
their personal and financial well-being.They have, obviously, little affection for the federal government.And they have no qualms about bankrolling the
Tea Party.

But the ultimate threat to global well-being is climactic,
not human—global warming.

Global warming is triggered by the runaway free-market
capitalism that the nation-state fosters through its ideology, financial and
legal system, and use of violence in order to secure the allegiance of the rich.And it seems there’s nothing that the modern,
republican, free-market-oriented, elite nurturing nation state can do about
that.

Given the perhaps terminal limitations of the existing
structure of nation-states, maybe all we can do is buckle our seatbelts and
hope for the best—and cast our envious eyes at the climate-controlled
fortresses the rich can construct on their remote mountaintops.

Does that mean that the US system of democratic
republicanism and free markets does not offer a solution? Is America, not
history, dead, killed by absentee capitalists and an overheating planet?

I am not sanguine concerning any revolutionary alternatives—although
“mob” and “snob” did come together for a brief moment in 1776, and a few, less
glorious interludes since then.

However, the capitalist system is infinitely creative, and
the government is always on the lookout to demonstrate the relevance of its
big, fancy financial system and gigantic military capabilities.

A nice, apocalyptic war against China might create enough
profitable creative destruction to engage the elites, even those with
significant interests inside China.Maybe Susan Rice can gin up a “responsibility to protect” the
environment to keep the capitalist ball rolling.Can coal-burning power plants can be a casus
belli?

7 comments:

What you mention is very interesting, and has been something I've been thinking about since I visited DC for the first time, and took a look at the monuments. America fashions its revolution as a sort of ground-up democracy fighting tyranny, and dedicates all these monuments in honor of that victory. However, if slaves made the pyramids of Egypt, who the hell bankrolled all these monuments? The American revolution as you mentioned was backed by a bunch of wealthy elites.

When you read about China's revolution against the Qing dynasty, they still needed the backing of the merchants and overseas Chinese to help. Revolutions are not cheap.

Thanks your comment. Most pre-civil war construction in Washington CD, including the White House and the Capitol building were built with significant amounts of slave labor. I've put together a post on the subject and I'll put it up in a day or two. Thanks again for your comment and the interesting slant it provided.CH

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